I remember getting a call from a company that was looking to contract someone for a job at the shoe store in the Tanger Outlets over in Blowing Rock. They explained it was an easy job, just show up, open the boxes that were delivered to the store, and do what the paper says. Plug this in, plug that in, then call this phone number and they’ll make sure it works. Easy job but then came the payment discussion. I explained that we charge $100 per hour on-site, plus $50 per hour travel time. She explained that this job paid something closer to $45, for the whole job. We went back and forth a bit, and I ended up taking the gig, but I can’t remember exactly at what rate. I did the work; it was easy enough but then time came to get paid. It took weeks of back and forth some more and then a check finally showed up for something like $100. The next time they called, I told them to go somewhere else.

I remember another job I took once, a client with a Mac OS X Server that wasn’t doing what he wanted. This was a failed attempt by Apple to break into enterprise server sales, I guess. I don’t know really what they were thinking, because they never gave it enough of a chance to make it work. But it was a regular Mac OS X machine with a bunch of open-source tools slammed on top to make it resemble a Windows Small Business Server. I believe there was OpenLDAP, Apache Web Server, Postfix for email, etc. And I can’t recall exactly what this client wanted that it wasn’t doing, but I thought it might be a chance to get a foot in with a company, so I showed up. What a mess that product ended up being in practice. Like most things Mac, if you stray too far outside of the lines of the GUI (which my Linux background had me do often), you could get into trouble. I don’t think I made any brownie points that day, and they never converted to a real client.

There was also a ton of residential work in the beginning. It is rather easy to find people who need things done in their homes. We continue to get calls regularly about helping with home networks. I installed so many $49 wireless routers… The thing is, you can go install a cheap router, and charge $100 to get it all set up, but there is a mind set in residential work that things should work forever. We regularly got follow up calls weeks or months later saying it wasn’t working now, and it’s all our fault, so we need to come out there and fix it. For free. Of course, usually it wasn’t our fault, but we were still pressured into coming back out to look at it without payment. Dropping residential work back in 2018 was one of the best things I could do for my company.

That’s the point here. Sure, when bootstrapping a company up from nothing, there are jobs you take to get food on the table. Most of the time, they work out just fine and you get a little bit of money in the process. But there comes a time when you must focus the business to make it work. We are exclusively business to business now, not because we couldn’t figure out how to make it profitable for residential work, rather because I couldn’t figure out how to uphold our quality while being split between the two. Home and in-store repairs were distracting us from the big picture. We couldn’t spend enough time learning about the things that businesses need. The Microsoft 365 system is a huge and complex beast, with a ton of value around every corner. Learning how to use it takes a lot of time and effort, and a small team just can’t be distracted.

There are still a lot of times that we have trouble saying no to people. That’s our compassion at work. We want to help everyone, we really do. It hurts to say no to someone, and it feels like we are pulling away from our mission at times. I have to keep reminding myself and my team that we are here for a specific purpose: “To build resilient communities through first in class business-to-business IT solutions.” All our values work together to achieve that mission. We constantly improve our quality by reducing distractions and keeping our focus. We are compassionate towards our clients and our team by not doing things we aren’t excellent at. And we’re honest with everyone about what we’re doing and why.

-Nate